The Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of the application software, hardware, and operating systems. Based on the PostScript language, each PDF file encapsulates a complete description of a fixed-layout flat document, including the text, fonts, vector graphics, raster images and other information needed to display it.

This post demonstrates the usage of the GroupDocs.Viewer APIs (GroupDocs.Viewer for .NET and GroupDocs.Viewer for Java) to render the supported file formats as PDF documents.

How to Render Using GroupDocs.Viewer

Both the viewer handlers (ViewerHtmlHandler,ViewerImageHandler) provide an overloaded method GetPdfFile() which accepts the document name as parameter and returns FileContainer. The File stream can be fetched from the Stream property of the FileContainer in order to save the resultant document on the disk.

The following code snippet shows the way to render a word document as PDF:

In this post, we share how we conducted our 2019 GroupDocs Pricing Review.

Last month we shared the news about GroupDocs 2019 pricing change. Our aim behind that change was simple: to make sure we are delivering the best value Document Management API suite on the market.

Each year we review our pricing and licensing model to make sure we’re continually giving developers the functionality and flexibility they need. Providing top quality APIs at fair prices along with permissive licensing models.

How we conducted the review

For this review we gathered a list Vendors in the “.NET Document Viewer” space, ensured they had approximately comparable functionality to GroupDocs.Viewer for .NET and Java and measured the value that developers can get from each API vendor on our list.

Many vendors offer only a small subset of the vast feature-set offered inside GroupDocs.Total. So when performing our review we couldn’t measure a true “like-for-like” comparison. As such, for this review we focused on a single product and looked at 9 other vendors that offered a .NET document viewer.

Pricing Comparison

Purely from a pricing perspective, comparing GroupDocs’ Developer OEM license type at $2997 USD, we found that GroupDocs was the 3rd lowest priced solution on the market.

Vendor

Cost for Equivalent OEM style license ($ USD)

Vendor A

–

$35940

Vendor B

–

$7400

Vendor C

–

$5499

Vendor D

–

$5000

Vendor E

–

$4995

Vendor F

–

$4719

Vendor G

–

$2999

GroupDocs

–

$2997

Vendor H *

–

$1995

Vendor I **

–

$1499

* This vendors Viewer only supports viewing PDF files ** This vendors Viewer is only supported on Silverlight and WPF

As well as being the most competitively priced API, our pricing starts at only $999, so the review doesn’t take our introductory, Developer Small Business license into account.

Usually, when we have to shop for groceries, we choose the supermarket where we can get almost every item that we need. This way we don’t have to visit multiple stores for different types of products. Similarly, being specific to the software products, the developers prefer the component that provides a wide range of features regarding their use case so that they don’t have to use multiple solutions.

Let’s be more specific and talk about the online document viewers that are becoming more popular in modern days because of their ability to display the files within the applications without any need of dedicated software programs. Most of the time, the developers want to use an all-in-one document viewer component that can display a wide range of file formats. Thus, they can avoid using multiple components to provide support for multiple file formats.

What if I tell you that it’s now possible to have a document viewer that supports 95+ file formats?

With this addition, the API now supports 95+ file formats and we have the eye on completing our century soon.

So, let’s not wait and use this powerful API for integrating an all-in-one document viewer component in your application. For more news and updates, stay tuned to our blog and keep posting to our forum.

You might be wondering if there would be more annotation types. The wait is over, we’ve introduced Link Annotation in GroupDocs.Annotation for .NET 19.4. With the passage of time we’ll introduce more annotations. Currently, Link Annotation is supported for PDF, Slides and Word documents only. Let’s see the minimal set of fields required for Link Annotation.

There is one improvement and few bug fixes introduced as well. Previously, GetPdfFile method was not processing password protected documents. Now, if you need to process password protected documents you should pass an extra parameter for GetPdfFile method.

Here we are with another release of GroupDocs.Conversion for .NET 19.4. We’ve implemented automatic naming when saving a converted document to file. Do you want to convert a CMX (Corel Metafile eXchange) file to PDF or any other supported file format? Then you must try out this release.

We also improved the process of getting page orientation for a specific page

Hello everyone! We are back with another exciting release announcement. In this post, I am going to give you an overview of what’s new as well as what’s improved and fixed in the latest release of GroupDocs.Viewer for .NET. In this release, we majorly focused on providing bug fixes and improvements. Along with this, we have introduced the support of CDR file format and the feature of rendering files contained in the ZIP archives. For details, you may also have look at the release notes.

First, let’s have a walk through the new features that we introduced in the latest release.

Support of CDR File Format

We have added the support of CDR file format that is a vector graphics file to store the images and it is used by CorelDRAW software.

Getting and Rendering Files from ZIP Archives

In the previous blog, we demonstrated how you can get the list of files, folders and the subfolders enclosed in a ZIP archive. Now, its time to go one step ahead and render the files contained in the ZIP archives. With the latest release, you can get the files located in the root as well as in a folder of the archive. The following code snippet shows how we can get and then render the files as attachments from an archive.

Metered related exception when License is initialized with other GroupDocs products

Extended support for ViewerConfig.FontDirectories setting to vector image formats

Improved rending attachments from password protected zip archives

Now, it’s time to enhance and upgrade your application with the features offered by the latest release of GroupDocs.Viewer for .NET. You may also evaluate the API features by downloading or cloning the complete examples project from GitHub repository.

As always, we would love to hear your suggestions at our forum. Cheers!

We’re also extending this pricing update to our
Conholdate.Total bundle.

Get ALL GroupDocs & Aspose APIs in our Conholdate.Total suite for a single, incredible price.

Conholdate.Total starts at only $3999, so, for only $1000 over the price of a GroupDocs.Total or Aspose.Total Developer Small Business license you can get EVERY GroupDocs and Aspose API AND free upgrades for a year.

Image previews are now commonly used to present your file/document to the users. It is quite useful when you want the users to quickly have a look at your document without downloading or opening it. As an example, MS Windows has this ability to provide the preview of the files in the preview pane of File Explorer without opening the document in the dedicated software program.

Did you ever desire to have the ability to generate image previews in your application? If yes then it is the time to embed this feature in your application with a few lines of code using GroupDocs.Metadata.

So, let’s have a look at how to generate image previews for the documents.

We have introduced PreviewHandler class in the GroupDocs.Metadata for .NET and Java to get the document pages in the form of images. Using PreviewHandler you can access and select the document page(s), either a single page or all pages, that you want to render as image. Below are the code snippets that generate the images of the pages in a Word document.

At the moment, we have launched this feature for the following documents:

PDF documents

Presentations

Spreadsheets

Word processing documents

Vision diagrams

OneNote documents

Images

Let’s not wait and try out this amazing feature by downloading the latest version of GroupDocs.Metadata for .NET and Java. You can explore and evaluate the API features by cloning/downloading the examples from the GitHub repository.

In case you would have any questions or suggestions, we would love to have a conversation with you on our forum.

Big News! We are going to launch GroupDocs.Redaction API for Java platform very soon. Similar to the .NET version, GroupDocs.Redaction for Java would be a backend API for removing sensitive and classified information from the popular document formats. As far as the supported features are concerned, this is going to be a replica of GroupDocs.Redaction for .NET. Through this API, we aim to provide you a single, format-independent interface containing a set of redaction methods to redact text, metadata, and annotations.

Let’s have a look at the salient features that you are going to get in the first version of GroupDocs.Redaction for Java.

Exact Phrase Text Redaction

Case-Sensitive Exact Phrase Text Redaction

Text Redaction with Colored Rectangle

Text Redaction using Regular Expression

Support of region redactions for image files

Metadata Redaction

Searching and Filtering Metadata for Redaction

Annotation Redaction

Removal of Sensitive Information from Annotation

Document Format Detection

Detailed Redaction Logging

Saving File in Original Format

Saving File as a Rasterized PDF

Ability to specify a set of redaction rules (policy) in an XML file

You are going to get the above-mentioned features for the following document formats:

PDF (.pdf)

MS Word (.doc, .docx, .dot, .odt, .dotx, .docm, .dotm, .rtf)

MS Excel (.xls, .xlsx, .xlt, .xltx, .xlsm, .xltm, .csv)

MS PowerPoint (.ppt, .pptx, .pps, .ppsx, .potx, .pptm, .ppsm, .potm)

Images (.jpg, .jpeg, .bmp, .png, .gif, .tiff, .tif)

Now, you might be interested in when you would get the first version of GroupDocs.Redaction for Java. Well, we won’t let you wait for enough because:

“Sometimes waiting is the hardest thing.”

Dean Koontz

At the moment, we are finalizing the first release of GroupDocs.Redaction for Java and hoping that you will be able to grab it very soon. Please stay tuned to our blog for more news and updates.

Its time to augment your document conversion experience. You will be pleased to hear the new features, improvements and bug fixes that we’r going to elaborate in this blog post. Did you ever think of converting and rotating a document at the same time? We make your wish come true with this month’s release of GroupDocs.Conversion for Java 19.4.You can now set page rotation angle when converting to a PDF or Image format. And it only takes a single line of code.

We implemented following new properties:

setRotate(PdfSaveOptions.Rotation.On90)

setRotateAngle(45)

Rotation Feature when Converting to Image Format

We enriched ImageSaveOptions class with a new property that takes rotation angle value as parameter.

Rotation when Converting to PDF

More File Formats and Font Substitution Options

Some new document formats are also introduced. Like you can do conversion from EPS, TSV, PCL.
API also permits to set default font and font substitution option when converting from .one file.

Measure Conversion Time

Can we measure or track time for a document conversion? You might be thinking of such a feature. Because its appealing. Therefore, we’ve introduced this in current release. Let’s have a look at its implementation.

Bug Fixes

We listen your feedback carefully and make sure to fix the disruptions that you face. Spreadsheets are one of the best way to represent data. Most of the time you add graphs in it. Previously, API was not converting spreadsheets with graphs properly. It was not showing complete data. However, this issue is now fixed.

Width and Height not Working

Furthermore, there was no impact of width and height in the output that you set in ImageSaveOptions. This issue is also now resolved.

Will we get PasswordProtectedException?

Yes, we fixed obfuscation config for com.groupdocs.conversion.exceptions package. You will now get proper exception on processing a password protected document without applying password. Eventually, this exception could be then handled.

To learn more about API integration and usage check out the docs here.
To see the implementation and functionalities, check out the GitHub repository.